A SURPRISING but heart-wrenching moment occurred at the closing ceremony of the 13th FIRST International Film Festival on July 28 in Xining, capital city of Qinghai when 41-year-old Hai Qing asked her fellow actresses, including Yao Chen, Liang Jing, Zhou Dongyu and Song Jia, to come on stage to plead for work.

“I’ve wanted to say it for a long time,” she said. “We are passionate about film, but most of us have been very passive and we are kept away from fine productions due to various limitations, such as the market and the script,” said the actress.

Hai’s words echo those of many other actresses who on different occasions have railed against ageism in the industry.

Female performers who are older than their mid-30s find themselves “over the hill” as the country’s film and TV industry has long been invested in peddling a youth-oriented image. Furthermore, in this day and age where stars’ online data and influence trump acting skills, young pop idols certainly have more currency in the industry.

In the 2018 variety show “I Am the Actor,” actress Yang Rong, who is in her 30s, also talked about her career dilemma. Although audiences and she herself are tired of her maintaining a girlish image on screen, she has yet to find a way around it for fear of being weeded out of the market.

Some audiences have observed that most actresses disappear after 35 or 40, and reappear at about 50 playing roles as mothers or grandmothers. Even Song Dandan, a household name in China who is known for her memorable roles playing mothers, once said that for the almost 10 years after she turned 35, she had nearly suspended her acting career as there were no proper roles for her.

Chinese actress Yong Mei, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress for the 2019 family saga “So Long, My Son” at the Berlin Film Festival, also lambasted the woeful predicament that middle-aged actresses are in.

“What it all boils down to is an aesthetic issue; people are not willing to see a beautiful middle-age woman on the screen. They only want to see young and beautiful faces,” she said.

The dearth of meaningful middle-aged female roles on the big screen can be attributed to the themes of films.

Even though the domestic film market has boomed in recent years, giving rise to a number of big box office hits like “The Wandering Earth” and “Wolf Warrior 2,” these are mainly themed on heroism, with male actors taking the leading roles and female performers as their foils.

However, according to director Fang Gangliang, the lack of middle-aged women as protagonists in TV dramas and films is mainly due to the fact that the majority of domestic TV and film audiences are the younger demographic, those in their teens and 20s, who want to see their stories reflected on screen.

This can explain why even though romantic dramas are mushrooming, they seem hardly to lose their appeal.

Even though it is universally true that leading roles for older women are thin on the ground, actors, producers, screenwriters, and directors in Hollywood, Japan and South Korea seem to already be aware of this issue and on their way to make a difference.

That’s why actresses like Kate Winslet, 44, Cate Blanchett, 50, and Meryl Streep, 70, are still ruling Hollywood; Kim Nam-joo, who is in her late 40s, can still wow audiences with her excellent interpretation of a complicated character in the 2018 South Korean TV series “Misty,” and many Japanese actresses born in the 1960s and 1970s, like Yuki Amami and Rie Miyazawa, are still active and popular.

In China, some successful middle-aged actresses, who are unsatisfied with the unfair representation of women on screen, have risen up to change the status quo by taking executive roles in film productions. For example, 40-year-old actress Yao Chen, who rooted for Hai Qing’s speech, has produced a new film, “Send Me to the Clouds,” in which she also starred. Xu Jinglei, a famed actress, has also directed several films where she starred as the lead actresses.

While film experts call for patience in waiting for a market that applauds mature actresses, a growing audience of mostly female viewers is calling for works with seasoned women in the leading roles. Last year, a poster for an alleged TV show titled “The Lady” went viral online, featuring four actresses in their 40s — 47-year-old Yu Feihong, 41-year-old Chen Shu, 42-year-old Zeng Li and 41-year-old Yuan Quan — playing an elegant designer, acerbic teacher, philanthropic businesswoman, and poker-faced doctor respectively.

The show turned out to be wishful thinking, but, “I’m begging investors, screenwriters, directors, and producers to cast more women over 40,” the creator wrote on Weibo. “The poster is fake, but my wish is real.”

Subsequently, the “The Lady” hashtag acquired over 190 million views on social media platform Weibo, promoted by Chen Shu and Zeng Li themselves, and new fan-made trailers and posters followed in rapid succession: “Let’s see whether the market dares to make some room for [them],” observed one popular Weibo comment.

Such was the enthusiasm that production company Easy Entertainment declared last May they had contacted the creator of the original poster and planned to make the TV series a reality. A year has passed, however, and fans are still waiting.

(China Daily)